Employing tech-savvy millennials seems an obvious short cut to help businesses keep up to speed with the digital revolution.

After all, the members of the millennial generation have grown up on digital devices. So they should be a big asset when it comes to getting ahead in the digitally-driven world.

Indeed millennials do have a lot to offer. But a complete solution is more complex.

Are millennials always digitally literate?

It’s tough to find a topic that spawns more cynicism, skepticism, and outright hatred on the Internet than investment banking networking.

Depending on the source, networking is either the most essential part of the job search…

…or a giant waste of time in which students spend countless hours attending information sessions standing around crowded bankers, unable to set themselves apart.

One of the best ways to get the job you really want is to keep track of the skills that employers are looking for – and to ensure that your skills set marry up.

That may mean constantly investing time and money to increase your portfolio of skills, but the rewards will make it worthwhile. Businesses look for top talent and will pay larger salaries to recruit and retain trainees with the right abilities.

To gain an edge over the competition, keeping improving your essential job skills and never stop learning.

Leading recruiters believe that the following skills are currently among the most in-demand from leading employers:

Most companies are well aware that millennial candidates consider a variety of factors beyond how much a job pays. More than the generations before them, these young professionals want to feel a sense of purpose about their work, both in the job itself and in the social causes their employers support. They want it to be fun, too—in fact, 88% of millennials reported wanting a “fun and social” workplace compared to 60% of baby boomers. They’re also looking for flexibility, such as remote-working arrangements and flexible hours, and they crave personal and professional growth, such as opportunities to build their knowledge, skills, and experience.

But one other factor seems to come up fairly frequently with millennial candidates: their job title.

How important is a title?

So, you want to know how to get into investment banking…
…despite the fact that:

It’s a much less “prestigious” field than it used to be;
It no longer pays a huge premium to other career options, such as engineering jobs at big tech companies; and
The recruiting process is now hyper-accelerated and crazy.
It’s OK – I understand!

Despite these potential downsides, we continue to receive questions about how to get into investment banking, and our traffic and sales have grown every year.

So, in the spirit of these continued questions, we’ll examine this topic from A to Z and provide a blueprint for banking recruiting.

Bitcoin and other virtual currencies are made possible by what’s known as blockchain technology. Blockchain is essentially a global public ledger capable of automatically recording and verifying a high volume of digital transactions, regardless of location.

Bitcoin’s popularity is proving blockchain’s usefulness in finance, but entrepreneurs have come to believe blockchain could transform many more industries. Ultimately, the use cases for a transparent, verifiable register of transaction data are practically endless — especially since blockchain operates through a decentralized platform requiring no central supervision, making it resistant to fraud.

When you’re a nice person, conflict can be a real challenge. Not that mean people are any better at conflict; they just enjoy it more.

New research from Columbia University shows that how you handle conflict can make or break your career. The researchers measured something scientifically that many of us have seen firsthand—people who are too aggressive in conflict situations harm their performance by upsetting and alienating their peers, while people who are too passive at handling conflict hinder their ability to reach their goals.

Ask any undergraduate student about the “investment banking recruiting timeline,” and you’ll always get the same response: everything starts ridiculously early.

Back in ancient times, recruiting took place during your 3rd year of undergraduate, and you interviewed for summer internships several months before they began.

But then banks realized that Facebook and Google also pay pretty well and offer better work/life balance, so they started to recruit earlier and earlier to lock in talent and make finance appear more “exclusive.”

Recruiters at banks tend to copy each other, so once one bank started to recruit early, everyone else joined in.

In practice, that means that if you’re not prepared for IB recruiting by the start of your 2nd year, you’re probably not going to join a large bank right out of undergrad.

In Hans Christian Andersen’s fable The Red Shoes, a young girl longs for a pair of pretty red shoes. She ultimately tricks the blind woman who cares for her into buying her a pair. Her love for the red shoes causes her to give them priority over the more important things in her life, and, as often happens in fables, karma is not on her side. The shoes become firmly stuck to her feet and force her to dance non-stop, to the point where she almost dies from exhaustion and starvation.

We can scoff at the little girl’s foolishness, but, in real life, we often do the same thing—we chase after the things that we think will make us happy and don’t realize that we’re heading down a dangerous path.

One study found that the people who experience the greatest job satisfaction aren’t the ones in the big, fancy offices; they’re the ones who approach their work as a calling, even when that work involves menial labor.

In praise of imperfect decisions:

Clarity and confidence develop as you go, not before you go.

An imperfect decision is better than none, if you learn as you go. But lack of decision-making leads to stagnation, pessimism, and deeper distress.

Things don’t magically get better on their own.

The worst thing you can do is nothing.

Most sales and service organizations have invested more time and effort in the past five years in improving managers’ coaching of reps than they did in the previous 50. This makes perfect sense: research by the Sales Executive Council shows that no other productivity investment comes close to coaching in improving reps’ performance.

But not all reps who get coached, even by good coaches, do better. In fact, our research shows that coaching is almost worthless when it targets the wrong reps. And our work suggests that management targets the wrong reps all the time.

The finance industry isn’t all about data entry and number crunching. In fact, now that AI is on the scene, the industry is on the hunt for individuals with strong soft skills.

According to a study from recruitment business Reed Global, the financial industry is prioritizing hiring people with strong communication skills over traditionally assumed skills such as economics and accounting.

In fact, ‘human skills’ such as oral and written comprehension were ranked as the most valuable for finance professionals, while economics and accounting and deductive reasoning were ranked the fourth and tenth most important.

In today’s digital economy, financial institutions must constantly innovate to find faster, more efficient and convenient ways to enable people and businesses to transact, offer and receive credit, and manage investments. The future growth and development of financial institutions depends on their ability to deliver these services in alignment with the way people live and work today. Making data-driven decisions to solve for these challenges is critical to a bank’s success and its ability to effectively enable the digital economy

Almost a third (31 percent) of UK professionals state that their expectations are ‘not being met at all’ by their current employer, whilst a further 24 percent state that their needs are only just ‘moderately’ being met. The findings, which come from research undertaken by recruiter Robert Walters and job board CV-Library – also suggest that while the amount they were paid was most important to staff, other benefits are increasingly playing a more prominent role in keeping staff motivated. Well over half (61 percent) claimed that work-life balance, flexible working hours (39 percent), and cultural fit (25 percent) are crucial to keeping them happy at work.

How to show respect:

I was asked during an interview, “How do you respect your customers when all you need is for them to make a purchase?” My thoughts went beyond customers to respect in general. The word ‘compassion’ came to mind.

Compassion feels like respect.

#1. Show respect by acknowledging personal struggle. Some team members have wayward children, others have financial stress, still others struggle with their marriage.

When you learn of a person’s struggle:

Resist the urge to solve struggles for people. You disrespect the struggle when you offer off-handed solutions.
Listen with interest.
Express compassion. “I’m sorry you’re going through this difficult situation.”
Express empathy. “It must be tough to face this challenge.”
Offer kindness. “I can’t pay your bills, but is there anything I can do to make today a little better?”
Show appreciation. “I appreciate your contributions while you’re carrying these personal concerns.”
#2. Show respect by acknowledging responsibility. Employees carry important responsibilities. Leading is tough and often under-appreciated.

You show respect when you:

Appreciate the burden, even if you don’t feel it yourself.
Realize that easy for you may be heavy to another.
Notice strengths. “You’re really good at … .”
Acknowledge progress. “I believe you’re an important factor in the way our meetings are improving.”
Research adds 5 ways to show respect:

Delegate important tasks.
Receive advice.
Provide freedom to pursue creative ideas.
Take an interest in someone’s nonwork life.
Stand with people during critical situations.

The culture at financial services firms is often perceived in a negative light. Hollywood portrayals of money-hungry bankers and traders who stop at nothing to make a buck have become commonplace. Meanwhile, it is generally accepted that bankers usually end up right around lawyers and members of Congress in terms of likability among the general public. In some ways, this negative image can be warranted, but I believe that by and large, the banking industry is populated by a lot of good people.

Successful people come from all walks of life, yet they all have one thing in common: where others see impenetrable barriers, they see challenges to embrace and obstacles to overcome.

Their confidence in the face of hardship is driven by their ability to let go of the negativity that holds so many otherwise sensible people back.

Obstacles do not block the path; they are the path.

This perspective helps successful people to think differently to everyone else, which is important, because if you think like everyone else, no matter how smart or experienced you are, you’ll hit the same ceiling. By thinking outside the box and going against the grain, successful people rise above their limitations.

At work, sharing the right aspects of yourself in the right ways is an art form. Disclosures that feel like relationship builders in the moment can wind up as obvious no-nos with hindsight.

Trouble is, you can’t build a strong professional network if you don’t open up to your colleagues. Doing so is tricky, because revealing the wrong things can have a devastating effect on your career.

You must know where the line is and be careful not to cross it, because once you share something, there is no going back.

Having close access to ultra-successful people can yield some pretty incredible information about who they really are, what makes them tick, and, most importantly, what makes them so successful and productive.

“Whenever you see a successful person, you only see the public glories, never the private sacrifices to reach them.” – Vaibhav Shah

Kevin Kruse is one such person. He recently interviewed over 200 ultra-successful people, including 7 billionaires, 13 Olympians, and a host of accomplished entrepreneurs. One of his most revealing sources of information came from their answers to a simple open-ended question:

Toxic people defy logic. Some are blissfully unaware of the negative impact that they have on those around them, and others seem to derive satisfaction from creating chaos and pushing other people’s buttons. Either way, they create unnecessary complexity, strife, and worst of all stress.

Studies have long shown that stress can have a lasting, negative impact on the brain. Exposure to even a few days of stress compromises the effectiveness of neurons in the hippocampus—an important brain area responsible for reasoning and memory. Weeks of stress cause reversible damage to neuronal dendrites (the small “arms” that brain cells use to communicate with each other), and months of stress can permanently destroy neurons. Stress is a formidable threat to your success—when stress gets out of control, your brain and your performance suffer.

When emotional intelligence (EQ) first appeared to the masses, it served as the missing link in a peculiar finding: people with average IQs outperform those with the highest IQs 70% of the time. This anomaly threw a massive wrench into the broadly held assumption that IQ was the sole source of success.

Decades of research now point to emotional intelligence as being the critical factor that sets star performers apart from the rest of the pack.

The connection is so strong that 90% of top performers have high emotional intelligence.

Soon, banks may recruit elementary school students for Finance internships 15 years in advance.

So, what happens if you complete a liberal arts major, have no finance-related experience, and then decide to apply for investment banking roles in your late 20s?

Most people would say it’s impossible – you’d need to complete a top MBA or think about non-IB roles at that stage.

But others would welcome the challenge.

I recently spoke with a reader who fell into that “Challenge Accepted” category.

Here’s how he accepted the challenge and won offers at a boutique investment bank and then a real estate debt fund:

Vegetarian salespeople are under the delusion that prospects will call them. Instead of interrupting prospects they wait to be interrupted.

Most of us grew up hearing the mantra “Don’t be a quitter,” and we’ve internalized it to the point where we feel guilty even if we don’t finish a book that’s boring us to death. Our parents weren’t entirely wrong in saying that persistence is necessary for success, but sometimes quitting is the most effective course of action. Whether it’s a failed project, a thankless job, or a doomed relationship, quitting can be a virtue.

“Quitting is leading too.” – Nelson Mandela

As it turns out, some of us are really good at knowing when to quit, while others have a hard time getting “unstuck.” Research from the University of Rochester found that people are motivated by either “approach goals” or “avoidance goals.”